It is bold to say, but even so we say it:
church is more than you have ever seen.

[ the limits of language ]

In the immortal words of British poet T.S. Eliot, "Words strain." Indeed, words often strain to find their meaning. Church is undoubtedly one such word often loaded-down with so much baggage that it becomes quite difficult to arrive at any meaning. What follows is our attempt to move toward the meaning of church...in the DCF context.

[ our dual expression of church ]

We view our Sunday Gatherings and our House Churches as having a similar theological vision.

At DCF both our Sunday Gatherings and our House Churches are expressions of the Body of Christ, visibly present on earth. And because of that dual expression, we have taken to calling both of them church. Through both of these expressions of church, we strive to be contextual, communal and missional. Here's what we mean...

By contextual, we mean: local, earthy, particular to a place, situated within its culture. The spiritual reality seems apparent: wherever it is located, Christ's community - the church - communicates Christ, for better or for worse. To quote R.E.M. from the late 1980s, "So, stand in the place where you live...."

We believe the Incarnation (God himself becoming flesh and bones in the person of Jesus) requires us to do just that: to stand in the place where we live. The Incarnation is not merely a historical event but also a pattern to emulate as we breathe and live and move in this world. As you will hopefully see, this incarnational pattern of being the church in a particular place charts the course for all kinds of DCF stuff...from our worship music to our emphasis on House Churches to our way of engaging the students and culture of Clemson University and our surrounding community.

By communal, we mean: relational and collective. We believe that the Christian faith is foremost a group-identity with a group-story and a group-mission, and all this identity, story and mission is oriented around the unique person of Jesus. Along the journey, we should naturally expect this group-orientation to be in serious conflict with the individualism inherent within us (no doubt, this individualism is also encouraged by contemporary American culture).

Nonetheless, we are gospel-people who are connected and bound together by grace and through faith. We are spiritual pilgrims - together - not as isolated individuals. The central metaphors for the church (in New Testament teaching) are family and house. These metaphors are beautifully full of color and texture, and they provoke us to do some recovery work in terms of actually becoming those images.

By missional, we mean: sent. We believe the church is realistically a sent, missionary-type community. As a collection of Christ-disciples, we must time and again find ourselves informed and formed by the tradition of Christ himself, who prayed to the Father: "As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world" (John 17).

In other words: like Christ, the church exists to bring pleasure to God by loving and serving the world to death. We do not exist for ourselves and our own blessedness; we exist to give ourselves away and to bless the world (think: Abraham). We are not called to bunker down and hang on, and we are certainly not called to perpetuate some form of Christian-ghetto living. Here, on earth, our "sent-ness" - like Christ's - is a necessary part of our life.

So in reality, our Sunday Gatherings and our House Churches are two sides to the presence of Christ as he manifests himself through DCF...for the sake of his gospel, his Kingdom and his world.

We view our Sunday Gatherings and our House Churches as necessary and complementary spiritual disciplines.

For various and diverse reasons, there is often a lot of guilt surrounding the topic of church. Perhaps it seems we are just piling on by using the word discipline. But all we are trying to say is: living in Christian community is continually an act of discipline. It takes intention, it takes energy and work, and it takes self-control to live in community with others. In fact, the word disciple is closely related to the word discipline.

In the first few centuries after Christ the ancient church had a word they used to describe discipline: asceticism. The Latin roots of this word simply mean "to exercise." At DCF we see our Sunday Gatherings and our House Churches as a primary way Christ and his Body exercise in this world. When we practice the discipline of coming together, Christ himself - through the exercise of his Body - makes grace available to us as his community and diffuses gospel-life into the world through us, for the world to see and hear and smell and touch and taste.

Practically speaking, then, our Sunday Gatherings and our House Churches are designed to be a complementary vision of Christian community. They are inter-dependent. Their relationship is a dynamic partnership. Neither needs to be in competition with the other, and neither needs to contradict the other. We believe they need each other in order to be complete.